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From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John
Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture
1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary
The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter
A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons
Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature
Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen
The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism
A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel
From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution
Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy
Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper
A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament
Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature
Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays
Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life
The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church
On second viewing, the Pixar movie Up, appealing enough in its first viewing, definitely got better. The things that annoyed me, didn’t; what I thought were flaws, weren’t.
Such as: The fast-paced first ten minutes were my favorite part of the movie the first time around; probably still. But on first viewing, I found myself disappointed that I didn’t get to spend more time with Ellie. An energetic pushy tomboy, she was far more appealing than the “small mailman” that accompanies Carl on his old-age adventures. But within the first segment, she had met Carl, married him, suffered a miscarriage, grew old, and died. I had only started to get to know her. I felt cheated.
Now I see that’s what the filmmakers wanted. Without that emotional opening sequence, we’d have a hard time sympathizing with Carl’s nostalgia and disappointment. Given the opening ten minutes, we don’t just see Carl sighing over the unfinished adventure scrapbook; we sigh right along with him. We miss Ellie as much as Carl does. The movie makes the viewer feel nostalgic, until we realize that we, like Carl, need to shed the Bunyanesque burden of the past (the house that Carl comically pulls around by the garden hose) and get on with the next thing.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, January 25, 2010 at 12:31 pm
Carroll again: He explains that much recent film criticism takes its cues from the effort to maximize aesthetic satisfaction. This is evident in the respect given to “transgressive” films that overturn “what are called the codes of Hollywood filmmaking”: “Within the context of recent film criticism, it is appropriate to regard disturbances of continuity editing, disorienting narrative ellipses, or disruptions of eyeline matches as subversions of a dominant and ideologically suspect form of filmmaking.”
Once incoherence is valorized, it becomes easy to project it to earlier films. Hence the popularity of the B-movies of Ed Wood: “Plan 9 from Outer Space is a cheap, slapdash attempt to make a feature film for very little, and in cutting corners to save money it violates – in outlandish ways – many of the decorums of Hollywood filmmaking that later avant-gardists also seek to affront. So insofar as the work of contemporary avant-gardists is aesthetically valued for its transgressiveness, why not appreciate Plan 9 from Outer Space under an analogous interpretation? Call it ‘unintentional modernism,’ but it is modernism nonetheless and appreciable as such.” It is certainly more aesthetically pleasing to view Wood’s films as transgressive; therefore, they are transgressive.
Without an appeal to intention, this movement is inevitable, because intention seems to be the only thing that distinguishes a mistake from a transgression.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, September 26, 2009 at 8:26 am
In his classic essay on the “work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,” Walter Benjamin made some trenchant observations on the way film affects actors and audiences. Importantly, he believes these effects are not the result of some perversion of the medium of film, but inherent in it.
The actor, he notes acts in “many separate performances” rather than in a single connected period of time, and not before an audience but in front of a mechanical device. This separation of audience and actor has a number of consequences for both.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, September 23, 2009 at 11:44 am
Evan Almighty is amusing in spots, but often cheesy, preachy, and predictable. But it does have one of the best put-downs of liberal theology I’ve seen anywhere. On God’s instructions, Evan Baxter has built a gigantic ark in the empty lots near his new DC-area home, endured the ridicule of the world and the skepticism of his family. The day of the flood comes, and it rains for a few moments and then clears. Evan’s wife suggests that Evan may have misinterpreted the message: “Maybe he didn’t mean a real flood. Maybe he meant a flood of insight, or emotion, or illumination.
Evan responds: “If that’s true, I am going to be sooo pissed.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, September 1, 2009 at 2:49 am
And another thing: Who could believe that you could make a movie that is not just watchable but deeply engaging with basically two people, one of whom says nothing? What kind of artistic chutzpah does it take to try to wring drama out of a 2-hour monologue? What kind of genius does it take to succeed?
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, June 27, 2009 at 11:30 am
Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 Persona is brilliant cinematic philosophy. Elisabet, an actress, becomes confused during a performance and falls silent. Her psychiatrist gives this diagnosis: She got tired of playing roles, putting on masks, and knew that every word she spoke involved some sort of performance. So she stopped speaking. But the psychiatrist also discerns that her silence is also a performance, and urges her to play it for all its worth and then move on to another role.
Sister Alma, a young nurse, takes care of Elisabet at a seaside cottage. Sharing days with the utterly silent Elisabet, she finds herself chattering on and on, revealing her most shameful secrets. Elisabet says nothing. Alma becomes desperate for something, a single word, a minute of conversation. She has given herself, and received nothing in return, and begins to go crazy. (Can a gift be given?) Only when, during a violent argument, Alma threatens to throw boiling water on her does Elisabet speak. Fear forces her out from behind the mask.
Several points from this very rich film:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, June 27, 2009 at 6:17 am
Virtually the first English words you hear in the recent film Transsiberian come from a pastor leading a mission trip to minister to children in China. ”Ours is not a gray world,” he says. ”Under the bright light of truth,” he says, “it’s a world of clear contrasts: black and white, good and evil, right and wrong. There’s always a choice. With faith, the choice is an easy one.”
Listening with others, Roy (Woody Harrelson) smiles and nods.
As the credits roll, though, the opening words seem ironic.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, December 31, 2008 at 12:35 pm
Two fatherless boys – Will, a pious member of the Plymouth Brethren, and Lee, the school’s bully and bad boy – find stability and hope when they become blood brothers and make an amateur Rambo spin-off.
It’s a promising premise, but Son of Rambow doesn’t carry it off.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, November 28, 2008 at 9:44 am
Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (HDM) trilogy truly deserves all the epithets hurled at it, and Christians are gearing up for the December release of the film version of The Golden Compass, the first book in the trilogy.
We needn’t worry. Hollywood is working its magic.
Chris Weitz, the on-again, off-again, back-on-again writer and director, explained how the film will treat the book’s anti-Christianity in an online interview back in 2004: “New Line is a company that makes films for economic returns. . . . They have expressed worry about the possibility of HDM’s perceived antireligiosity making it an unviable project financially . . . Needless to say, all my best efforts will be directed towards keeping HDM as liberating and iconoclastic an experience as I can. But there may be some modification of terms.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, November 9, 2007 at 8:06 am
In his splendid performance history of Shakespeare, David Bevington frequently comments on the “scenic literalism” of film and television. Commenting on a TV production of As You Like It, he laments that the production “tells us where we are in the story by putting entire landscapes or interiors in front of our eyes even before the characters have said a word. We ‘read’ the scene first in terms of its visual setting. In this case, the attempt is misguided because it takes away the magic of an imagined landscape where all sorts of things can and do happen that would be absurd in an actual rural location.” Even Laurence Olivier is “unable to rescue [Paul Czinner's 1936 film] from its saccharine premise that the play is a good old-fashioned love story set in a picturesque countryside.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, September 26, 2007 at 6:52 pm
Ellen Belton points out that in the 1995 BBC production of Pride and Prejudice, “Elizabeth and Darcy (Colin Firth) are hardly ever frames together until well into the second half of the film, and when they are shown in the same shot, the effect is to emphasize the obstacles between them. In the private interview at Hunsford that precedes the first proposal scene, Elizabeth and Darcy rarely look directly at one another. In the one shot in which both their faces are seen, Elizabeth is seated on the left, Darcy on the right, each framed against a different window and each looking toward the camera. A fall cabinet/writing desk between the windows in the background dominates the center of the shot. In the proposal scene itself, Elizabeth and Darcy’s faces are never seen in the same frame until Elizabeth rises to hasten Darcy’s departure.” Yet, from the beginning the film anticipates their eventual union by a progression from “sidelong glances to direct contemplation to mutual admiration.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, August 10, 2007 at 5:10 pm
In his history of American movies (thanks again Ken Myers), David Thomson notes that “there was in the ordinary lifestile of the first moguls a steady habit of gambling.” David Selznick, he says, “lost a couple of million dollars in two years.”
No wonder: Their whole industry is a form of gambling: “Making a movie is not a wise, judicious use of money. . . . But to make a movie puts on in line, notionally, for a very big hit. Increasingly in the history of movis . . . the ethos of the stand-out super-hit has taken over from a policy of steady business. That in itself is a mark of how unbusinesslike the business is.”
To illustrate, he describes the process of funding for The Ten Commandments:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, December 24, 2006 at 8:45 am
Last year, we got the first season of Lost on DVD and were instantly hooked. These guys sure know how to hold an audience. But for me the hold is weakening as we begin watching the second seson, as it becomes increasingly clear that all these people escaped from a Sidney psyche ward.
Flight 815 was a ship of fools.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, September 21, 2006 at 6:11 am
In many ways, The Island is a silly movie: Long, repetitive, boring chase scenes, inexplicable explosions, impossible escapes, gaping holes in the plot, all filmed with MTV quick-cuts and apparently lit with strobe lights. Somewhere on the far side of the silliness, however, is a welcome indictment of the dehumanization and outright murder involved in genetic manipulation, cloning, and other biotechnologies.
Remarkably, the film hits a number of key prolife themes. The connection between slavery and bioethics is hammered from various directions: Ewan McGregor plays the clone of Tom Lincoln, the Moses-Christ figure who harrows hell and emancipates the clones at the close of the movie (but to where?? there is no promised land), and Djimon Hounsou is Albert Laurent, an African head of a private security agency who comes to see his own experience mirrored in that of the clones.
The cloning operation is presented as idolatrous hubris. In one of the few overtly religious references in the movie, the villainous Dr. Merrick (Sean Bean) is defending himself to Laurent. “When did killing become a business for you?” Laurent asks, to which Merrick answers “I don’t kill. I give life. I can cure childhood leukemia. How many people can say that?” “Only you and God,” Laurent answers. “That’s the answer you were looking for, wasn’t it?”
Yes, that’s exactly the answer.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, December 18, 2005 at 7:43 am
Sky High focuses on Will Stronghold, son of the greatest superhero duo in history – The Commander and Jetstream, who has some difficulty (but not nearly enough) discovering his powers. Though as much a high school story as a superhero story, Sky High will inevitably be compared with The Incredibles, and will suffer by the comparison. The cartoon has a vastly better script, is much more inventive, and is a sustained assault on egalitarianism. Sky High is of two minds about the superiority of the super. The filmmakers can’t decide whether to mock egalitarianism or promote it, and end up doing both: The Green superheroine Layla’s distrust of “labeling” is played for laughs, yet the film as a whole dismantles the hierarchy of superhero and sidekick. The movie has its amusing moments, but Mr. Incredible is my preferred hero any day.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, December 10, 2005 at 11:03 am
Keanu Reeves seems incapable of playing anything but a Christ figure (remember his supersonic ascension at the end of Matrix 1). In the recent horror film, Constantine, he plays John Constantine (J.C. – get it?), an agnostic, chain-smoking suicide restored to life to work as a free-lance exorcist. He hopes to earn a place in heaven, so that he can escape the unpleasant prospect of spending eternity in a hell populated by demons he sent there through his work as an exorcist. The film deploys Christian symbols, but the world of the film is more Manichean than Christian.
At the heart of the story is the angel Gabriel’s plot to carry out an alternative plan for humanity’s redemption. Unhappy that God so readily saves people who confess and believe, she (yes, it’s Gabriela) embarks on a strategy of making humanity worthy of God’s love, a strategy that involves a sword of destiny and a psychic policewoman who will be used as the “doorway” through which Mammon, Satan’s son, will be born into the world. As humanity faces the horrors Mammon will unleash, it will display a respectable degree of courage and perseverance and be worthy of God.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, October 26, 2005 at 1:20 pm
In a 2003 TNR review of Roman Polanski’s Oscar-winning film, The Pianist, Michael Oren gives information about Wilm Hosenfeld, the German officer who assists Szpilman:
“while scrounging in an abandoned house for food, Szpilman comes face-to-face with a German officer. Instead of drawing his revolver, the officer asks Szpilman what he does for a living, and then leads him to a piano. Stiff and unpracticed, Szpilman manages to perform Chopin’s Nocturne in C-Sharp Minor, whereupon the officer steeves him in an attic directly above the German headquarters and feeds him. . . .
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, September 14, 2005 at 10:29 am
This 2004 Indian musical version of the Austen novel is energetic, colorful, distracting fun. At several points, it departs from Austen’s novel. Darcy’s proposal does not come out of the blue, but at the end of a series of dates (including a helicopter ride over LA and a sunset walk on the beach, accompanied by a very large robed church choir). Darcy doesn’t secretly take care of the Wickham-Lydia affair, but chases Wickham down in a theater, where they slug it out in front of the film audience. There is no Lady Catherine; Darcy’s mother stands in, and doesn’t appear enough to be much of a threat to the romance. And the pace and balance of the story is all wrong; Darcy does not propose until we are an hour and a half into the film, and things have to wrap up in twenty minutes.
I don’t object to these departures because I’m an Austen purist. I object because none of the departures from the original improved the story; in every instance, the changes weakened the original. I’ve always enjoyed Austen’s controlled, crystalline prose, her psychological insight, her wicked humor. But I came away from Bride and Prejudice with a deeper appreciation of Austen’s skill in plotting (which is not considered her strongest suit).
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, September 12, 2005 at 8:01 pm
Hamann allegorized a hermeneutical principle of Jer 38: “We all find ourselves in such a swampy prison as the one in which Jeremiah found himself. Old rags served as ropes to pull him out; to them he owed his gratitude for saving him. Not their appearance, but the services they provided him and the use he made of them, redeemed his life from danger”
He also finds a hermeneutical principle in the story of David’s madness: “Who can read the story of David without a trembling of reverent fear . . . [the story of one] who distorted his gestures, played like a fool, painted the doors of the gate, [and] slobbered on his beard, without hearing in the judgment of Achish an echo of the thinking of an unbelieving joker and sophist of our time.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, July 14, 2005 at 6:12 pm
Some thoughts on Claude Berri’s beautiful and provocative 1986/1987 films Jean de Florette and Manon of the Springs.
1. The story is a reverse Oedipus tale, focusing on how Cesar Soubeyran(Yves Montand) ruins and kills his own son (Jean, played by Girard Depardieu) without knowing it is his son. The Oedipus allusions are made fairly explicit. A blind woman tells him that the hunchback is his son, and the preacher at the church service refers to the Oedipus myth, comparing the loss of water in the village to the plague of Thebes and calling the sinner responsible to confess it.
2. There are important Girardian elements. Jean is an outsider, treated with contempt because he is not from the village and because he is a hunchback. Manon (Ernestine Mazurowna) is an outsider throughout the second film, living in the hills and watching her goats. Yet she is not considered a curse but a blessing; everyone wants her to pray for water. As Girard says, the scapegoat ends up being the savior, and thus treated as “semi-divine.” People pray to the now-dead Jean several times in the second film. At the end Manon is married to the teacher (another outsider) but they become integrated into the village.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, June 18, 2005 at 3:01 pm
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